The Watch Dogs Watch

[DalekFlay]

Just get a 750ti for $140ish.

Need a CPU upgrade more than anything, which means a mobo and RAM upgrade as well. I'm saving a hundred bucks a month toward it or so. Shouldn't be too long, not a big deal.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I have the game now. First time I installed it, it fucked up the DirectX installation and I had to restore my computer to an earlier point. Second time I installed it, it wouldn't load past the opening Ubisoft title and I had to verify the files in Uplay.

Finally got in game, got past the introduction to find the game is hideously unoptimised, even with the latest Nvidia drivers I have to turn everything down to medium at 1920x1080, SSAO off, FXAA and the game still stutters like a bitch.

I'm on a Core 2 Quad 9660, Geforce 560TI. In comparison I could run Assassin's Creed 4 and Far Cry 3 at max, and Sleeping Dogs / Arkham City / Arkham Origins at high settings with only DX 11 and AA turned down somewhat. I could also run Crysis 3 on pretty good settings. I know my processor is old, and my gfx card isn't great, but they should be able to run this pretty well.

What the fuck bro, I'm playing on a i5 760, Nvidia GTX 460, with SSAO and on High and it runs stable. Not the highest frames in the world, but no stuttering whatsoever.

Your processor may be better than mine - although I have heard the last of the Core 2 Quads can hold their own against i5s, depending on the ghz.

I got good frame rates inside the stadium at the start, barring the odd stutter when shifting between rooms (not sure what caused it). But when I went outside the game started to act like a hog.

 

[Angthoron]

I have the game now. First time I installed it, it fucked up the DirectX installation and I had to restore my computer to an earlier point. Second time I installed it, it wouldn't load past the opening Ubisoft title and I had to verify the files in Uplay.

Finally got in game, got past the introduction to find the game is hideously unoptimised, even with the latest Nvidia drivers I have to turn everything down to medium at 1920x1080, SSAO off, FXAA and the game still stutters like a bitch.

I'm on a Core 2 Quad 9660, Geforce 560TI. In comparison I could run Assassin's Creed 4 and Far Cry 3 at max, and Sleeping Dogs / Arkham City / Arkham Origins at high settings with only DX 11 and AA turned down somewhat. I could also run Crysis 3 on pretty good settings. I know my processor is old, and my gfx card isn't great, but they should be able to run this pretty well.

What the fuck bro, I'm playing on a i5 760, Nvidia GTX 460, with SSAO and on High and it runs stable. Not the highest frames in the world, but no stuttering whatsoever.

Your processor may be better than mine - although I have heard the last of the Core 2 Quads can hold their own against i5s, depending on the ghz.

I got good frame rates inside the stadium at the start, barring the odd stutter when shifting between rooms (not sure what caused it). But when I went outside the game started to act like a hog.

Hm, now that you mention it - at the start I recall something like that happening too. And I started on Low as well. Maybe there's something fucked up with the Low settings to begin with. Suppose the mid-high settings load the GPU more than the CPU anyway, and yours should be better than mine, so, might be worth trying.

 

[Metro]

I just spent £280 on gym membership and personal trainer.

Waste. You can find workouts online and free weights are cheap.

 

[Bubbles]

It's quite hard to lose 200 pounds on your own.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I just spent £280 on gym membership and personal trainer.

Waste. You can find workouts online and free weights are cheap.

Personalised to me, with a definite goal in mind. Plus, I am a lazy fuck and can't motivate myself. I need someone to tell me what to do, at least to begin with.

Once I get through what I've paid for I'll be going to a cheaper gym, with no trainer. By that point I'll have put on some muscle and I will know what I need to do to sustain it.

It's quite hard to lose 200 pounds on your own.

I weigh 11 stone 12. I need to put on weight, not lose it.

 

[Metro]

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I weigh 168 pounds. If I lose 200 pounds I'll be in minus figures. I am going to the gym to build up muscle, not lose weight. I should be gaining weight over the next few months and it'll be going into muscle.

 

[Metro]

Calm down, fatty fatty fat.

 

[anus_pounder]

^ Codex : The Elementary Years

 

[Machocruz]

What is going on with men these days? Personal trainers are for brainwashed untermenschen and women*

*redundant.

 

[Monad]

There was one part where I felt like I was playing Drive: The Videogame which was pretty cool. A game like that where you just play the getaway car and have different scenarios with really tight driving physics on the level of a sim and good stealth and AI would be amazing.

 

[crakkie]

Waiting for Watch Dogs Blood Dragon then.

Oh shit, some cybernetic 1980s hack-shooter with decks and neural jacks, no plot, and extra cheese. Sign me the fuck up!
In a year or two, for $15.

 

[Turisas]

I'm on a Core 2 Quad 9660, Geforce 560TI.

See there's your problem. Welcome to the NeXt-GeN xTREEME, yo!

 

[Outlander]

Waiting for Watch Dogs Blood Dragon then.

Oh shit, some cybernetic 1980s hack-shooter with decks and neural jacks, no plot, and extra cheese. Sign me the fuck up!
In a year or two, for $15.

 

[Echo Mirage]

What happened to this day one patch that everyone on the steam forums and Nvidia was hyping up to be the be all and end all of the games performance issues?.

 

[Monad]

What happened to this day one patch that everyone on the steam forums and Nvidia was hyping up to be the be all and end all of the games performance issues?.

Well Nvidia released new drivers yesterday, but beyond that I don't know. It seems to be running pretty well for me with a single 660 ti.

 

[bonescraper]

What happened to this day one patch that everyone on the steam forums and Nvidia was hyping up to be the be all and eInd all of the games performance issues?.

If you downloaded your game on release day you already got the patched version.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Single player is meh at best, usual Ubisoft shit. Get to the tower, enlarge control area, get new side missions. At least some side missions are fun and hacking phones/webcames provides some entertainment.
Multiplayer is however some chaotic fun. Some guy wrecked havoc on poor citizens after failing to find me ( spend my years hiding in Souls game, I'm untouchable in crowds ) Killed many with gunfire and hacked nearby underground pipes which cuased a large traffic accident. I was casualy hiding in my car, parked in a lot when all that happened.
Driving is terrribad which also leads to funny moments in multi. Destruciton Derby on Chicago streets.

 

[Angthoron]

I had a massive police chase after me when some guy dropped in to hack my session. Of course, what he didn't expect is that he'd land right in the zone where I just managed to mire the entire Chicago Police force, which immediately dropped the pursuit after me and went for him. Putting a bullet through his brain wasn't exactly a challenge - guy climbing a phone booth and then cycling his weapons while being chased by 30 policemen was a bit too obvious.

Also had an interesting AI thing yesterday - had to take out a couple of NPCs in a Gang Stronghold mission. Took out all the guards and then the guy just started firing at my position to keep me pinned. Sneaked out, flanked him - all the while he kept firing at the last position he saw me at. Dunno if the AI bugged out and just had him spamfire, or if that's an actual thing with the AI trying to be less omniscient, if it's the latter then it's pretty cool.

And yeah, it does feel like one of them Batman games as a Gadgeteer a lot of the time.

 

[Cyberarmy]

That is an actual thing, if you stay low enough and change position a lot, AI keep shooting to your last known location till it see you again.

 

[Angthoron]

Oh, that's pretty cool.

 

[Infinitron]

My Review of Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs has been hyped as the first true "next-gen" title by the insufferable people who make those sorts of claims. Early trailers portrayed a dense, atmospheric rumination on technology with an emphasis on non-violent player creativity. Now it's time to find out what the game actually is.

Ready for something different?

You play a white man in his thirties with a gun. Whether he's threatening a bad guy or consoling to a loved one, the sound that comes out of his mouth is that of Batman practicing his raspy growl in a library.

Yeah, but are you ready for something really different?

Looming over a beaten man, your first interaction in the game is to aim your gun at the unarmed guy and pull the trigger.

Soon there's a car chase. Oh boy. You need to lose the cops by driving fast and making unpredictable turns. Within seconds multiple cars slam into one another, knocking a weightless telephone pole onto the street. Everyone stays absolutely still until one car randomly speeds forward then backwards. At this point in real life your spirit should float to the ceiling and look down sadly, watching your stupid body play another one of these fucking games.

Okay, I promised something different.

The main character (Aiden Pearce) has an evidence wall. There are photos and ominous words and lines and even circled things. He is out for justice.

Hmm. Something different. Okay, what about this?

Aiden has a nightmare about a dead female. This is what fuels him. Justice and payback and self-angst.

The nightmare is Aiden's memory of the night his niece was murdered. A hitman had been ordered to kill the girl in order to scare Aiden off from doing more BIG HACKS. The assassin's plan? Get on a motorcycle and sort of bump into Aiden's car while yelling, then shoot a tire to flip the car, killing the girl but leaving her uncle alive. A very simple plan with only one possible outcome.

Or maybe the killer was trying to kill Aiden. I don't know. An earlier scene showed a client telling the assassin to hit Aiden and kill his family, with the ultimate goal being to "scare them". If "them" meant either Aiden and his partner or Aiden's family, how would killing them be step one in a two step plan that ended in them being scared?

Anyway, Aiden wakes up. While gargling sandpaper he talks about his inability to escape the memory of his niece's death. The final overwrought sentence of this monologue has not even ended when the game pops up a "1911 Handgun Unlocked" message.

Something different...

You look at a map of the city and feel a thrill as it becomes populated by a ton of icons. This sensation is a bigger high than anything you will experience carrying out the activities those icons represent. There are outposts, things to stand on and press a button to collect, racing missions that show off the abysmal driving model, and bad guys to observe - don't let them see you or the mission ends - then run after on foot. The game asks you to do each of these things until you get tired of them, then do them an additional fifteen times. Gotta have a lot of icons on that map, after all.

Different?

Well, the game doesn't have the movement speed or vertical freedom of Assassin's Creed, the physics goofiness of Grand Theft Auto, or any of the hand to hand combat you'll find in Sleeping Dogs. Even though there's a lot of shooting it doesn't have the satisfying gunplay of Far Cry 3. It does have hacking, though. That's sort of the selling point, right?

Point your cell phone at a person to see their profile and a little portrait. No matter what their age may be, everyone has the face of a beautiful middle-aged Oblivion orc.

Profiles are randomized and offer absolutely nothing. After the first few minutes they become white noise. Of course. In a game that takes place in a large city there's just no way to make enough unique profile variables to justify their existence. So why have them at all? If you haven't played an Ubisoft open world game you might not know this, but it's more important for something to seem impressive than to actually be meaningful in the way that it suggests.

Point your cell phone at an object. Hold X to hack, toggling the thing on or off. That's it. The outcomes are very limited in scope. Hack a distractionary object to make people 10 feet away look at it for a few moments. Hack an exploding thing to make people right in front of it die. The most dynamic hack in the game is a traffic light, and that just causes an accident which occasionally stops your pursuers. In practice there's very little variety or room for player creativity.

Stealth, the most potentially interesting mechanic, is hobbled by the rigid hacking system. Restricted areas are confined and packed with way too many guards on short patrol routes that don't offer opportunities to sneak past cleanly. You're forced to hack a few obvious spots in the environment to get by without fighting, and it's often easier to just hack a camera to locate and activate your goal remotely. Sure, the latter is conceptually sort of cool, but why have stealth at all in the first place if it isn't more engaging than the shortcut?

One virtual reality stealth mini-game features enemies who spawn in large numbers by dropping from the sky, often landing close enough to spot you immediately. Hmm. You must reach a generator and disable it, then travel a fair distance across the city to the next generator to repeat the process. Twenty times. That's Watch Dogs in a nutshell.

Watch Dogs is all bluster. It has nothing to say about its themes or its all-too-familiar characters and the tiresome plot things they do, nothing to offer the player, nothing to prop up its expansive but hollow facade. It will be a tremendous commercial and critical success.

 

[Cyberarmy]

I like that how people expected "Citizen Cane of Gaming" from a game that has been released on both old and next gen from Ubisoft. Also Ubisoft is lying about the content and cutting lots in game stuff they've shown before since AC3 but people still jumps onto hype trains blindly.

 

[Angthoron]

I like that how people expected "Citizen Cane of Gaming" from a game that has been released on both old and next gen from Ubisoft. Also Ubisoft is lying about the content and cutting lots in game stuff they've shown before since AC3 but people still jumps onto hype trains blindly.

This. I don't quite get what people were expecting, for me, it fully matches the expectations of "another open world shooter with some minor differences from others, and prettier graphics I can't see on my computer"

However, you can see just how massively Rockstar has fucked up by delaying the release of GTA 5 on the PC (and on the next-gens) - Ubi's servers dead for hours as people rush for their GTA substitute, huge success, no matter what the media will say now, Watch Dogs is now going to be a franchise. People waiting for GTA, with their upgraded machines and consoles, already have something else. Naturally, they'll still buy it when it comes out because it's GTA, but the WD already got there first, and no matter what, it's not that shallow or average to be ignored as an entry; it's certainly not a GTA clone of the PS2 era, not at all.

So yeah, instead of having the players on PC/next-gens potentially wow-ed, Rockstar helped Ubi create a competitive IP. Good job R*.